1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to messaging systems, and more particularly, to supporting the use of multiple external messaging systems in an application program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a 24×7 international business environment, electronic messaging provides a convenient way for companies to communicate with customers all over the globe. Currently, many companies have dedicated e-mail inboxes defined for specific business areas. Often, employees called agents are assigned to poll and manage the support requests from customers for one or more dedicated e-mail inboxes, as well as from their individual agent inboxes. With customer support centers handling very large numbers of customer support requests daily, increasing the efficiency of each agent in responding to each customer request by only seconds can produce enormous cost savings for the customer support center.
To provide international support, companies must be able to communicate with customers using a variety of electronic messaging systems. If a company wishes to implement a customer support center where agents can communicate using multiple messaging systems, typically the company must purchase different software products to handle each messaging system because of the different communication protocols involved. Because different products must be purchased, agents must learn to use a different user interface for each messaging system. Efficiency of an agent typically degrades when he or she must remember different user interfaces for communicating with customers via different messaging systems.
Furthermore, tracking activities performed by a customer support center when agents are using many different application programs is cumbersome. It is desirable to capture data about all customer service activity, regardless of the application program used to perform the activity. Thus, it is desirable to enable customer service agents to communicate with customers using a variety of messaging systems and to track all activities performed, regardless of the application program used to perform the activity.